Tuesday, January 10, 2012

For better or for worse, even sleep deprived.

So Joey has this...um...habit...of sleep screaming. Yes, you read that right. It doesn't happen a lot, but when it does, it's terrifying.

It used to happen with a recurring dream about spiders. The man is bat-shit terrified of spiders, y'all. He would be having some sort of REM-induced Charlotte's Web nightmare, only to jolt himself (and me!) out of a sound sleep by sitting straight up in bed and tearing at the air around him with vim and vigor to squash all the imaginary attack spiders. In our 4-and-some-change years of marriage, I have nearly crapped the bed and/or had a heart attack all dozen or so times this has happened.

The other night, he did it again for the first time in a long time. But instead of declaring war on imaginary spiders, he sat straight up and SCREAMED at the laundry basket next to our bed to "STAY RIGHT THERE!" Now, as I mentioned on Facebook, the laundry basket could have really been being an asshole for all I know. I was dead asleep. At least until he screamed me awake and my heart rate rose to a trillion BPM, causing me to not fall back asleep that evening and be very grumpalicious in the morning.

And then last night, the man I love more than anything on planet earth did. it. again. OMG. Two nights in a row with this. But apparently in last night's dream, our house was on fire. So he sat up straight in bed and started screaming "GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT RIGHT NOW!"

Now, in the event of an actual fire in my home, I would hope he would do just a tidge more to get me and Alex out to safety, but I'll give him a pass since he was, in fact, sleeping when he was trying to save me from an imaginary flaming inferno with little to no actual escape plan.

I can't help but think all this night screaming means something. My initial thoughts tell me it means he needs to sleep on the couch so I'm not woken up by screams that literally make my heart beat out of my chest and make it impossible to fall back asleep. My secondary thoughts pretty much tell me the same thing.

I suppose it could be worse. I know a guy who used to sleep drive. Yes, this is true. Even I have strange sleep habits--I was a horrible sleepwalker when I was a kid. I tried to pee in the sink once, and another time I was at summer camp and walked (sleeping!) like 100 yards behind my cabin in the middle of the night. Yeah, that was creepy. Imagine waking up in the middle of a forest. Alone.

So, anyway, back to my original point. How can we get the sleep screaming to stop? Perhaps no more ice cream before bed...